


Yusuke Kitagawa and the Color of Magic

by catasterisms (Half_Life_Wolf)



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Crossover - Harry Potter, Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-02 23:16:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13328499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Half_Life_Wolf/pseuds/catasterisms
Summary: Eccentricity is expected of artists. And, apparently, of wizards too-- even after his tenure as a Phantom Thief is over, Yusuke keeps uncovering new secrets about himself.





	Yusuke Kitagawa and the Color of Magic

**Author's Note:**

> I came across a post on tumblr from back in the day that listed one of the founders of Mahoutokoro, the Pottermore Japanese wizarding school, as Sayuri Kitagawa, and I was like "holy shit that's some coincidence, what if Yusuke was secretly a wizard and just never knew about it". In doing some research I came to the conclusion that this tumblr post was 99% fabricated from whole cloth but I still liked the idea, so I ran with it.

The first time it happens, Yusuke is in the kitchen making dinner out of white rice, one egg, and a handful of leftover instant ramen seasoning packets, which is what happens when you have to plan a meal based on the shoestring budget of one art school college student and a jobless dropout. Since the kitchen is also the living room is also the bedroom, Ryuji is sprawled out across the futon couch, half lazily leafing through an old issue of Sports Weekly with Akihiko Sanada in boxing attire on the cover and half observing him out of the periphery of his vision, because Yusuke is a little bit captivating. He may be a visual artist but he moves like a dancer, all grace and flourish and flow-- and he's got a nice ass. That helps.

So Ryuji is uniquely placed to notice something about Yusuke's behavior that Yusuke himself unconsciously doesn't when he unthinkingly levitates a cup of hot water across the room. At first he considers it a trick of the light, a fabrication of overtired eyes. Ryuji's seen a lot of weird shit in the last couple of years, but aside from the talking cat it usually stays contained inside various facets of the cognitive world instead of slopping over into daily life, perverting the simple domesticity of a quiet Sunday at home. Just to be sure, he lowers the magazine and focuses, watching the cup skate across thin air to Yusuke's hand and then, when he's done with it, back to the counter from whence it came.

"Hey, babe?" Ryuji calls, his voice lilting with the uptick of anxiety he can't quite smother.

Yusuke hums in distracted assent. "Yes?"

"Can you pass me the, uh. Shit. The milk?"

"Of course." Yusuke approves of this suggestion, even if it means Ryuji will probably be drinking out of the bottle as he's told him half a hundred times not to, because their maternal nattering at each other is mutual, and how is Ryuji's leg ever going to properly heal if he doesn't get enough calcium? Ignore the fact that it's been years and the bone's already set and anyway it probably doesn't really work like that once you're an adult and at your full height, but what does Ryuji know, he'll take the milk. Yusuke is still at the sink, swirling drifts of secret recipe shrimp-flavor seasoning powder into his hot water to make a hypnotic Uzumaki-style spiral, and mesmerized by the art found in everyday things he doesn't bother crossing the room to the refrigerator. The door pops open by itself, and the half-empty milk bottle wobbles just a little as it begins to bob through the air towards him.

Ryuji sits straight up on the couch with an unknowable dread rising in his stomach. "Yusuke," he says, a little louder. Since Ryuji is always loud, this is a feat. "Look at me, Fox."

Yusuke turns sharply on his heel, elegantly plucked brows furrowed together in an expression of beautiful annoyance. "What is it? I'm trying to--" His face falls into carefully composed blankness as he views the milk bottle hovering in the air at a point equidistant between them, indignation faltering. "To concentrate," he finishes faintly.

The milk bottle drops to the hardwood kitchen floor and shatters into a blast radius of a million sharp, shining pieces, the liquid splattered like runny paint. Modern art.

\---

"Maybe it's ghosts. Have you considered seriously enough that it might be ghosts? I really think it's ghosts."

It's Monday now and Mishima is here after his classes have finished, because a guy who spends half his life on r/nosleep is the closest thing to a paranormal investigator the Phantom Thieves have got on staff since Akira fucked back off to whatever hole he initially crawled out of. Not that Ryuji's still bitter about that or anything but-- that's a whole other bucket of problems. Mishima is poking around the kitchen with his usual excitable interest. Ryuji always gets the sense that he's happy just to be included, which is a little bit awkward and depressing all rolled into one pathetic bundle.

"You mean, like, possession?" Ryuji asks. "You think he's got the devil in him?"

"Preposterous," Yusuke scoffs, arms crossed closed and defensive over his chest. "I feel the same as I always have."

"You think he's  _ always _ had the devil in him?"

Mishima leans forward intently, squinting into Yusuke's eyes. Given the foot and a half of height difference between them, this is a challenge. "Well, I don't know about that," he says, tilting his head to the side as though looking at things from a slightly different angle might skew him into Yusuke's frame of reference. "Couldn't this also be just more, you know." He waves his hands in the air between them as though about to perform his own sort of magic trick. "Shadow business?"

"How's Goemon doing lately?" Ryuji asks.

Yusuke would never be so crude as to shrug, but the tone of his voice perfectly indicates the same sentiment. "The same. I haven't begun manifesting ice crystals in my morning coffee, if that's what you're asking."

"Other than the levitation, has anything else weird been happening?"

It's Ryuji's turn to shrug. "Not that I know of."

Yusuke looks abruptly uncomfortable. "Ah," he says. Two pairs of inquisitive eyes turn on him, and in the face of this scrutiny his back instinctively straightens, unbowed as ever under the weight of the outside world's lack of understanding. "Ryuji, I think I may have changed the color of your hair the other day. Only temporarily, however, nothing to be concerned about."

Ryuji's staring has become more open and blatant now. "'Scuse me, what?"

"It was when you were sitting for The Portrait, if you recall." The Portrait has been Yusuke's signature project and source of ultimate frustration for about six months. Every version of it grows more abstract and wild as he searches for a way to encapsulate what he considers to be the essence of his feelings for Ryuji in a manner that can be nailed down on paper and proudly shown off to all their friends. It's sweet, in a way, and possibly the only way in which Yusuke is capable of being sweet or expressing his appreciation, and Ryuji never minds sitting for him, but every incarnation of it becomes less comprehensible to him. "All the yellow wasn't fitting with the color scheme of the rest of the composition and I had the thought that things would be so much simpler if I knew what it had looked like before you started bleaching it, and then the next time I looked up at you from my canvas, it was... different. Black as night."

"That's like, the opposite of flattering," Ryuji grumbles, reaching up to tug at a lock of his scruffy hair. It's too short for him to really see the color, but it feels the same as always, still sort of washed out and brittle from the bleaching.

"I was so mortified I didn't dare say anything," Yusuke goes on, sounding completely shameless in the moment. "By the time we'd finished our session for the day it had gone back to normal regardless, so I put it out of my mind."

"Dude, in the future, that's the kind of thing you might want to mention."

"Why? It only would have worried you."

"Sometimes it's worth being worried about things," Mishima muses. "Does this kind of stuff happen often, Yusuke?"

"On occasion. As you know I work long hours and have a history of chronic malnourishment-- I've always assumed these discrepancies in reality were a product of exhaustion or hunger poisoning my perception."

"You know that's not normal, right?" Ryuji asks.

This is the zen of Yusuke Kitagawa: "It is the way it is. If there's nothing to be done about it, I  don't see the sense in kicking up a fuss."

"Let's hope for your sake they're friendly ghosts," Mishima sighs.

\---

Yusuke's robe arrives at the window one morning delivered by a flock of petrels tapping at the pane and looking like a scene out of Disney's Cinderella. Ryuji half expects them to try to dress him in it, small beaks and claws draping him in the lavish silk fabric. This is after, of course, in his shock and surprise Ryuji attempted to slam the window shut on them. The cloud of birds pours into the apartment and fills it with chittering cheeps, the rustle of feathers, and a sense of the absurd that makes Ryuji want to kick something.

The supernatural is cool, but this isn't  _ for him _ \--it's something that he's specifically excluded from, in fact. The birds circle around Yusuke as he stands in muted surprise from his easel to greet the curiosity of them, and he holds out his arms for the fabric to drop into, hanging like a curtain from his hands. The silk flows through his fingers like water, pink as pepto bismol or cherry blossoms in the spring, smooth enough to shimmer in the light.

"Did you do this?" Ryuji demands while Yusuke stares in transfixed awe at the kimono, as though manifesting antique formalwear were on par with minor feats of prestidigitation. Yusuke holds it up in front of himself, letting it fully unfurl. The kimono is the fancy kind without embroidery, pale pink all over like the pearlescent inside of a shell and featuring sleeves broad and deep enough to hide a loaf of bread in.

"No," Yusuke says, still staring. "It's a wonderful piece, but I would never have dreamed of owning an item such as this."

A petrel lands on Ryuji's shoulder, talons digging into the ratty soft fabric of one of his overworn t-shirts, and he attempts to shoo it off. "Then what the eff is happening, Yusuke?"

"I'm not quite sure. I appear to have received a gift."

Ryuji cups the squawking bird in both hands and tosses it bodily back out the window, where it caws in offense and begins to circle the building. "Who do we know that's mental enough to try to send a package by courier pigeon? Madarame?"

"Unlikely. I don't believe he has access to his funds in prison."

"Then what," Ryuji gestures with one hand towards the picture he makes pulling on the heavy fabric, "is this?"

It suits him, Ryuji can tell that much. The color scheme wouldn't have been anyone's first choice for Yusuke, whose dark hair gleams just a little bit blue under most light, tinged navy like deep water or the sky just before the last light of evening is leached away. His pale, anemic China-doll skin lacks the luster that would compliment warm colors; even Ryuji, whose knowledge of art begins and ends with the color wheel theory they taught his class as kindergarteners, understands this. But with the fabric drawn up around his body and the sash securely tied around his sunken waist Yusuke somehow looks princely, regal, so composed and correct. He looks like an ink drawing, understated and simple and perfect. Ryuji coughs into his fist.

"You look, uh."

"It's quite heavy," Yusuke remarks, lifting an arm to let the sleeve drape as it is meant to. A bird hops onto his limply extended wrist, beating its wings against the air, and Yusuke doesn't attempt to toss it away. "Good quality material. And warm, as well."

He looks like some Imperial magistrate from bygone days, but Ryuji isn't about to tell him that. Any time they edge into such sappy territory his throat closes up around the words, face flushing pinker than the impossible robes. "We should call Akira," he says.

"Oh, let's not disturb him," Yusuke says. "Not over something as minor as this."

"Minor? There's going to be bird shit  _ all over _ the apartment."

"But we're not in any danger. This seems a benign occurrence."

"Okay," Ryuji says, giving up. "I'm all for pretending this is perfectly goddamn normal if you are." He slouches across the room in his familiar bowlegged walk to lay a hand on Yusuke's shoulder, petting the silk material. It crackles like static under his touch.

Yusuke looks down at him seriously, with such passion in his dark eyes that Ryuji can hardly account for the swell of emotion there. "Ryuji," he says, soft and low and breaking, and he drops his arm to cup the side of Ryuji's face instead, cold, long-fingered hand folding over his cheek and the crook of his jaw to tilt his head back. "I don't know what's happening to me, but thank you for being here for it." And a part of Ryuji's heart is melting before Yusuke has even leaned in to kiss him, though he knows instinctively that that is what will happen, tuned to the movements of Yusuke's body and lit up in anticipation of his mouth on his, softly sighing in the way that Yusuke always has. In response Ryuji bends himself around the frame of Yusuke's body, clinging as close as the robe, arm around his waist and hand pressing against the small of his back to lead him in the dance and chest pushed to chest feeling his breathing--

Something crinkles between them and Ryuji growls in the back of his throat as Yusuke retreats, reaching into the place where the kimono closes at mid-chest height. "What now?" he asks.

"It's a letter," Yusuke says, the corner of his kissed-flush mouth turning down as he unrolls the scrap of parchment. "From the sender, perhaps? How kind."

Despite himself, Ryuji peers over to catch a glimpse of the words and the paper. They, too, are antiquated, written in flowing ink-brush strokes that run together in a chaotic, beautiful mess. "Mahoutokoro?" he snorts. "What's that? 'A place for magic', you gotta be kiddin' me."

"They've invited me somewhere," Yusuke says quietly, summarizing. "A school. My mother was an alumnus there-- oh, heavens." He collapses abruptly back into the chair where he'd been painting, straight down like watching the controlled demolition and implosion of a building. Ryuji rests his hand on his shoulder again, craning his neck to get another look.

_ "In the name and honor of Kitagawa Sayuri, accomplished graduate and witch of the First Order, we invite you to attend summer lessons this semester," _ Ryuji reads. "Hey, this isn't some kind of a joke, is it?"

"It's in remarkably poor taste if it is," Yusuke says, and Ryuji can understand what he's thinking: the name Kitagawa Sayuri, repeated over and over, echoing in his mind the way it has for over a decade. The idea that his mother may have bequeathed him some legacy other than an appreciation for art.

No one shows up in person to explain this. There's no "Yer a wizard, Yusuke," and no one to hold his hand as the wave of shock crashes over the rocks of his psyche except Ryuji, who is no one's first choice for confidence and consolation. All Yusuke has is a letter with his mother's name on it and a bright pink robe and a hapless boyfriend and a living room full of birds and silence.

"I think a bird shit on your canvas," Ryuji says after awhile.

\---

Every morning at six on the dot all summer Yusuke wakes up, puts on his robes, and climbs out their fifth-storey window onto the back of a giant petrel to be whisked away to an island far in the south. It makes Ryuji miss their previous morning ritual, where the alarm would go off at quarter to nine and Ryuji would throw it at the wall and they'd stay curled up with each other under the covers until gnawing hunger forced Yusuke out of bed. Then they would share a breakfast of cold rice and instant coffee, or if there was time scrape together enough pocket change for a walk to Leblanc and a curry with fresh-pressed espresso on the house, and Yusuke would head off for Gedai Arts University with his canvas and paints and pencils all zipped up in his floppy-but-professional portfolio. Now Ryuji listens to him rustling around the apartment and lays in bed alone until the sheets get cold.

He needs to get a job, and not only because Yusuke's scholarship is barely keeping the lights on. Their apartment has always been wallpapered in Yusuke's art, but now he comes home in the evenings with new inspiration and draws the most fantastic things: a mountain encrusted in outcroppings of jade castles like mushrooms sprouting from the firm flesh of a tree, birds as big as tactical armored vehicles dancing in the sun, clouds of mist billowing in the twining shape of a dragon. For all the things that Ryuji has seen, somehow none of his experiences compare to this-- because it isn't something that he can share.

They were in the Metaverse together, Palace after lavish mindfuck Palace; they walked the non-Euclidean staircases while Yusuke lectured him about M.C. Escher and the art of depicting impossible objects, sliced Shadows to pieces in the halls of a futuristic spaceship, scampered about as mice between hideous bronze-cast statues of Shido aboard a cruise ship to nowhere. All of it felt like a bizarre fever dream, but it was a bonding experience. Now Yusuke goes away and comes back and Ryuji doesn't even have the gratification of listening to him ramble incomprehensibly about his day and the techniques he's studied over dinner. Ryuji misses the impromptu art history lessons that he once found dull and dragging, would pay attention for more than the sake of Yusuke's interest in ferrotype photography or the development of the lightbox just to hold onto something they could have together again.

By mid-August Akira has been gone for a year and a half and Yusuke has been missing for six weeks, a ghost flitting through Ryuji's life. And he tries not to resent it, he really does, because sometimes in the mornings Yusuke will roll him over half-asleep and press a kiss to his forehead and tell him  _ I'm leaving, love _ in such a tender, wonderstruck tone of voice that it makes Ryuji reach up and wind a hand through his hair and hold him close for another kiss without even opening his eyes. And sometimes Yusuke will call him over to admire one of his new pictures, which are a riot of color and frenzy of activity, portraits of his classmates in action and all, images of the rolling ocean for miles on glimmering miles.

And sometimes at midnight Ryuji will wake up to an empty bed and catch him at the refrigerator, touching the tips of his fingers to the museum postcard replica of the  _ Sayuri _ they've pinned there with a promotional magnet from Wild Duck Burger, just looking. Ryuji calls his own mother every Saturday night. He knows what's important.

It's just hard to  _ feel _ important, sometimes, when there's so much he doesn't know.

"I'm not supposed to show you this," Yusuke says after school one night in a tone of childish wonder that he must have picked up from the actual children he's learning with, a gaggle of small seven year olds and one eighteen year old man in the same silly clothing waving their wands around. Yusuke has a wand, too, a grey and gnarled stick carved as he claims from the wood of the Jinmenshi, the tree that bears human-faced fruit, and Ryuji doesn't ever want to think about that for too long at a stretch. The wand is out now, held loose but somehow firm like a brush between the fingers of his right hand, and Ryuji tracks the tip of it as he drags it through the air. "But I believe you've earned the right to be included.  _ Sashite! _ "

A stream of sparks pours from the end of the stick like a private firework, shedding light in every color of the rainbow and some that Ryuji swears he's never seen before. It's pretty, but with no practical purpose, like much of what Yusuke does and loves. "Neat," Ryuji says approvingly. He feels like there should be some sense of awe rising up in him, but really, the whole affair in actual practice feels deeply mundane. In the way that he once got used to donning leather and a mask that felt like actual bone against his face, he supposes that a person can get acclimated to anything, given time and the right mindset.

"They call it octarine," Yusuke says. "The color of magic. Can you see it?"

Ryuji can, when he closes his eyes. It lives there against the lids, in the darkness, like the residue left behind any bright light, burned into his corneas-- a thing beyond imagining, past description. To Yusuke, who trades on the interplay of light and color, such a thing must be a treasure without price.

"I know now what I am meant to do," Yusuke says, his voice trembling. "No witch or wizard has ever found a way to capture that hue, with or without the aid of magic. My teachers say that it is fleeting, ephemeral, cannot be contained." Already the memory of it is fading from Ryuji's mind like the last remnants of a dream after a long sleep. "But I will find a way to capture it, and with that pigment I will finally be able to finish it."

"Finish what?" Ryuji asks, blinking. No amount of rapid eye movement will summon back the strange color.

"The painting," he says. "Your portrait. That's what was missing, the element of you that I could never faithfully translate. Magic."

Ryuji's heart clenches with the great gravity of a collapsing star, all the heat drawn up out of his blood and into his cheeks. "Come on, dude," he mutters, scuffing his stocking foot against the floor.

"Do you think I'm not serious?"

"No, I know you are. You never aren't."

Yusuke puts his wand away, tucking it into the broad sleeve of his robe, and takes a step forward. "Have you heard of alchemy, Ryuji?" he asks.

"I've seen some Fullmetal Alchemist, yeah. That show's the shit."

"No, not like that." Yusuke shakes his head the slightest fraction, and his thin, fond smile is like his mother's, distant and beguiling and full of affection that can't be quantified. "Alchemy is a form of magic, and all magic is a form of alchemy. It is the strange science of transforming one thing into another. You may have no magic in you of the strain that I possess, but you are as accomplished an alchemist as Flamel or Elric. Since I met you, my life has been forever changed."

They are close enough to touch, now, bodies just a breath away from brushing. Ryuji, who is familiar with arcane electricity, can feel it in the slim space between them, a current of pent-up potential energy. He swallows thickly. "I mean, me too."

"Do you remember the first time we kissed?" Yusuke asks, his voice as smooth as silk. "I had never thought I needed anyone else before. Oh, I had leaned on Madarame enough for support and companionship, but he was not my father, and I had thought myself content with only the memory of love. I hated being touched. I was a singular entity, detached from everything I sought to reproduce in the work that was my life. And then you kissed me." His smile widens, remembering. "Magic."

Outside it is raining, a sweet late-summer rain, and the window is still open from Yusuke's entry, letting in the smell of petrichor and a chill wind to ruffle the papers pinned to the walls. Inside it is still and quiet and warm, and the clock ticks steady and loud as the beat of his heart in his ears and Yusuke's words seem to echo and linger, a moment trapped in amber that will calcify inside his soul. "We should have called you Kitsune after all," Ryuji says, his words rough as gravel. His hands are at Yusuke's  _ obi _ , and then Yusuke's fingers are covering his, helping him tease the fabric from its knot.

When the robe falls open and slips from his shoulders, when it pools around their feet on the floor, Yusuke isn't a wizard or a thief or a fox-- he's only a man, eccentric and unusual, who loves cooking and painting and  _ him _ . And just like the first time when his hands find Yusuke's collar and he drags him down into a kiss, something and nothing and everything changes.

Just like magic.  
  


_ Postscript _

"Where's the funeral?"

This is the first thing Akira Kurusu has said with his real voice and not text-message lettering to either of his best friends in almost exactly two years. He's just gotten off the last of a series of trains from Inaba to Tokyo and it shows in the dark bags beneath the rims of his glasses and the Jansport duffel bag squirming with restless cat still slung across his back. But he's got his punched ticket to the special collections gallery at the National Museum of Modern Art clenched in his right hand and he's smiling through the travel fatigue, pleased as punch to have made it for the last fifteen minutes of the opening night of Yusuke's first solo exhibition.

Ryuji grins and claps him on the back. "Well hi to you, too. You look like hammered shit, dude. Here's some emergency champagne, I'll go grab a full one for ya."

Akira accepts Ryuji's half-empty flute of liquor gratefully and sips from the opposite edge of the glass, raising an eyebrow at Yusuke. "So?"

With a flick of his wrist, Yusuke brushes a scrap of imaginary lint from the front of his billowing white robes. Voluminous as his pink apprentice's coat, they are pale as fresh-fallen snow in the morning, as desert-bleached bone. "I was expelled from magic school," he says, as though commenting on the weather.

"Okay," Akira says, gulping the rest of his champagne and setting the empty glass smoothly on the tray of a passing waiter. "What for?"

"For this." Yusuke steps back and sweeps his hand out in a wide arc, proudly presenting the painting behind him. It's nearly floor to ceiling high, an explosion of color against a background that doesn't fit right in Akira's eyes; it could be a stylized rendering of a cherry tree in full bloom, or the static that sparks between two people, or the face of a man, depending on your perspective.

"They say that a good definition of modern art is that it still evokes an emotional response in you, but you can no longer articulate why," Akira says.

"God, but you're pretentious sometimes," Ryuji grumbles, rolling his eyes. "You two are perfect for each other."

"I broke the Japanese wizard's code," Yusuke tells him, more to the point. "The ordinary folk shouldn't see this, but I wanted it to be shared."

Akira squints down at the placard.  _ The Portrait. Kitagawa Yusuke, c. 20XX. Oil and ??? on canvas. _ "Good one, Ryuji," he says. "It looks just like you."

"It looks like jumbled nonsense," Ryuji says proudly.

"Was it worth it?" Akira asks, straightening up.

"I know who I am," Yusuke says, "and who my mother was, and what I want to be for the rest of my life. I don't need any fancy tricks to accomplish that." This time, as ever and without shame, it's Ryuji who reaches for his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Octarine and the color of magic are, of course, references to Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. That's enough crossovers for one day.


End file.
